It's a Saturday afternoon in May, and while most teenagers are out shopping or hanging out with their friends, an enthusiastic few have chosen to turn up at Lewisham town hall with their parents. They are here to attend the final workshop of Partners in Learning, a six-month project run by Lewisham local authority to provide year 10 and 11 African Caribbean students from 21 families with Samsung Q1 tablet PCs. Today there's a distinct shortage of boys and dads, but this is almost certainly down to the competing attraction of the FA cup final.

Students are here to give short presentations about how they've used the tablets, and what they've been able to achieve. Several do the presentations with their mums, and it becomes clear that the parents have got as much out of this experiment as the children. As Rosalyn Barnett, a student at Northbrook school, puts it: "My mum always tries to go on it, and I limit her time."

Partners in Learning is part of the wider Black Pupils' Achievement Programme (BPAP), a government-funded project in which 25 local authorities have addressed the problem of educational under-attainment among African Caribbean pupils.

In Lewisham, 200 families with year 9 children were selected to take part in the programme in 2006. The students chosen had been identified as having the potential to do well academically, on the basis of key stage 2 Sats, but who were under-achieving. Since then, schools, students and families have worked together to tackle problem areas, teachers have been given training, and students have been offered mentoring.

Jan Shapiro, BPAP project leader, believes this family involvement is key, and says the active participation of fathers has been one of the "most gratifying" elements of the programme. Students' progress has been closely tracked, and early indications are encouraging, but the real test of success or failure will come when the GCSE results are published this August.

Working together

The idea of the Partners in Learning pilot is to help a subset of selected families work more effectively together, enable both students and parents to develop technology skills, and provide students with access to a computer whenever they needed it.

Each student was given a Q1 - a lightweight mobile device that has wireless internet access and multimedia functions. Students enter information by using a stylus to write on the tablet, and the handwritten words are then converted to typed text. There is also a slightly awkward keyboard at the side of the screen that students can use if they prefer.

The devices are equipped with RedHalo software, which provides each student with a personal learning space where they can store their work, whether it's handwritten notes from a lesson, typed homework, photographs, videos or audio recordings. The software automatically creates a web page of the student's work, which a teacher can then access on request.

A parents' page on the school's Fronter virtual learning environment (VLE) allows direct communication with the school. At a series of four workshops, parents, students and teachers have shared best practice and study skills.

It is a bold experiment but what has it achieved? Among the students giving presentations today, it's clear that this has been a project for the whole family, not just individual students. One mother and her daughter tell the audience how they've researched recycling together and used their findings to start composting at home.

Rosalyn's mum, Patience Barnett, watches proudly as her daughter gives an accomplished presentation showing how she has taken digital photographs and manipulated them using Photoshop on Q1. Barnett believes that taking part in the project has given her daughter a real boost: "I know she's got a lot of talent, but she can be a little bit lackadaisical. This is a very versatile tool - it has given her more independence in doing things when she's wanted to do things. I think it's expanded her creativity."

The flexibility of the mobile devices has been a big attraction. "It made it really easy to do homework," says Desree Asante, another student presenting. "It made doing any kind of work easier - you could do it any time, morning, evening, outside. I got much more work done."

Boosting confidence

Desree's mother, Sandra, says she has seen her daughter grow in confidence throughout the BPAP, to the extent that she is now aiming for As in her GCSEs.

For Jan Shapiro, one of the greatest benefits the project has brought is the flourishing partnership between home and school. "It's enabled really quick communication with the student and their family," she says, adding that in one family a three-year-old sibling learnt to draw and take photographs using the device.

The local authority is now looking to extend the use of the technology and apply the lessons learnt in other schools. And there's a happy conclusion to today's workshop: students are told that they can keep their devices. "We'll go ahead and use it as much as we can," says Desree's mum. "For us it came at the right time."